Begging for Your Pay

[groovedaddy]

Romulo Saldana was looking for work.
It was 2001, and Saldana had moved to East Harlem from a small town in the Ecuadorian Andes three years before. Besides a sister, he knew few people in the city. A friend sent him to Manuel, an older Ecuadorian, who had papers and owned a successful construction company in Queens. The man hired Saldana as a day laborer and, over the course of five years, he built some 30 block houses, the kind of low-rise brick rental units that have sprung up lately in sections of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Eventually, Saldana was promoted to foreman.

Every week, Saldana would gather his crew of six men in the “yarda” — a garage in a house the boss owned in Long Island — to hand out their pay. Only the money would always come up short — sometimes $3,000 for all of them together, sometimes just $1,000, even when they were owed a total of $4,000. At first, Saldana didn’t much mind his boss’s negligence: it was the height of the construction boom; he was able to do other jobs on the side. “I trusted him because he was from my country,’ Saldana told me, in Spanish. “I thought, ‘’If he isn’t going to pay me this week, he will pay me later.’”

In 2006, Saldana added up all those deferred promises in his notebook: $34,000. He is still seeking most of that money.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/begging-for-your-pay/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=ab1

[rfranklin]

1. Republicans are the same no matter what nationality...

Screw everyone else whenever possible.

And before you challenge me--I believe that Republicanism is a pathology and should be deemed so by the APA.